Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Chocolate Chip Shortbread

If you have been reading my blog for a while now you will know that I love to bake and for a while now I have been doing it on a pretty regular basis ever since I did my bake sale for comic relief, my passion has become even more and I thought I would share with you some of the things I make.

Last week I decided to Make something from the Paul Hollywood Baking book I have for Christmas last year. So I decided to make Buttery Shortbread Biscuits The recipe was basic but suggested adding different flavours and I decided Chocolate chips were a good choice.

Ingredients

225g unsalted butter, softened

110g caster sugar plus extra for dusting

225g plain flour plus extra for dusting

110g cornflour

Pinch of salt

100g chocolate chips or rasins

Line a brownie pan or baking tray with baking parchment or grease with butter

In a large bowl put the butter and the sugar and cream together with an electric hand held mixer until light and fluffy. Then sift the flour, cornflour and salt in to the bowl and mix together until smoothly combined, then turn out on to a lightly floured surface and knead to a soft dough this is where you put the chocolate chips of any other flavours.

There are two ways you can do it from here if you want shaped shortbread roll the dough between two pieces of baking paper until about 1 cm thick then you can cut you shapes with either a knife or cookie cutters, and place on the baking tray. Or like me you can press the dough into a brownie pan and smooth to the edges.

Put the prepared shortbread in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 170oc. Before you put the shortbread on the oven mark it ready for cutting I also pricked mine with a fork for added pattern.

Bake the shortbread for about 20 minutes, until turning golden brown at the edges. Leave on the baking trays to cool and firm then dust with icing sugar and then cut leave to go completely cool. They will keep in an airtight container for 3-4 days.

Enjoy them they're really good.

If you give these a go please tweet me a picture I would love to see them.